In Past Show

As a master of the Russian realist painting school, Borodin´s name has been often associated with battle scenes of the "Great Patriotic War" (World War II), but the core in this Collection is also formed by portraits, genre painting, and landscapes. Borodin was a brilliant portraitist. His models were a farmer, a teacher, a student, a milkmaid, a pensioner, a female crane operator, and so on, to sum up, ordinary people. Their appearance is not perfect, but contains the deep and sincere interest in the person depicted coming from the author. There are trust and psychological deepness, strength and contained spirituality, humanity and internal beauty, in the portraits of humble people. They all aim to raise man's dignity. We will never see affectation or vulgarity in his artworks. From the plastic point of view, sobriety is imposed as a fundamental aesthetic value.

Aleksey Ivanovich Borodin was born in Kirilovka, Samara Region, in 1915. During the Russian Civil War, he was orphaned and was placed in the care of the military regiment of education. Borodin attended the Saratov Art and Industry School under the guidance of F. Belousov, and B. Milovidov, from which he graduated in 1936 with a diploma in teaching painting and drawing. Also, for a short time, he studied under the guidance of Igor Grabar, one of the most celebrated Russian impressionists in history.

Borodin was wounded in a tank battle in Mongolia while serving in an armored division of the Red Army during World War II. As a master teacher of painting was entitled to the reservation, but abandoned it and went to war, drawing numerous front line sketches. After the War, he taught art at his alma mater until the 1960’s when he moved to Volgograd (former Stalingrad), where he lived until his death in 2004.

Awards: Honoured Artist of Russia (1967), Member of the Union of Russian Artists (1939).

Exhibitions: Most of the USSR-sponsored exhibitions from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. In 1986, Borodin was honoured with a one-man exhibition at the Volgograd Art Museum; where posthumously in 2005 took place a wide exhibition of his works. From the year 2000 to 2012 his works have been exhibited in sixteen museums throughout Spain in the collective exhibition "Rusia Siglo XX".